Thursday, June 30, 2016

Much of what Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has to say about gender
identity is cogent and intelligent. At times, unfortunately, her argument goes
off the rails and descends into the kind of paranoid and crypto-Marxist thinking
that has bedeviled feminism from the onset.

Yet, she is far more enlightened than noted dimwit Judith Butler.

RRC sees that it all begins at birth, when you are assigned
a gender. She sees that you are, effectively, the gender you are assigned at
birth. Assigned because of the manifest appearance of your external genitalia.
Despite all of the nonsense about gender, no one who has ever had a baby has
heard the obstetrician or the midwife declare: it’s undecided.

Only someone suffering from a serious mental defect would say that gender is assigned arbitrarily.

Second, members of each gender are taxed with different duties. Being male or female confers obligations on each and every
one of us. Since RRC considers herself a feminist, she does not note that,
among these rules is a manly duty to protect women. Nowadays women have
decided that being protected is demeaning, and that they are strong enough to
protect themselves.

Well, not exactly. They can protect themselves with a myriad
of new laws, with the suspension of due process for anyone they accuse, and with the
awesome power of the state.

Note well: since
gender identity is based on an objectively observable reality, each person’s
moral obligations are defined and assigned. Thus, other people will know for a fact whether an individual has fulfilled them.

If your gender identity is known only to you-- an absurd
proposition that has become politically correct dogma-- then no one will know
whether you have fulfilled your duties or not. And no one will ever really know
who you are. If it’s all in your mind, you have no face. And having no face
makes you a self-declared pariah. Why this should be desirable is beyond me.

Since human community-- like human DNA-- is structured in binary terms, blinding yourself to identifying gender markers spells the disintegration of
community. It makes social anomie a policy goal.

Third, today’s culture warriors have concluded that you should decide your own gender. You,
as a splendid individual, have been granted the power to decide who you are and
what you are. And you can do so without any reference to the way that others
see you or your biological reality. RRC emphasizes a point that others rarely
mention: it’s one thing to convince yourself that you are an elf; it’s quite
another to force others to treat you accordingly. By definition, forcing people
to act contrary to their observation of reality is oppressive.

The culture warriors believe that whatever your biological
reality, you can change it reality by
changing your mind. Thinking will make it so. The notion borders on delusional,
and it becomes even more delusional when you decide that everyone else must see
you as you have chosen to define yourself.

Note also that the argument for gender fluidity ignores the best interest of society. It sets the individual off against the social good and social harmony, thus dooming the structure that sustains these deliria.

We to take the notion of gender fluidity seriously, RRC
says, we would find ourselves with a reduction
ad absurdum. There would be as many possible genders as there are people.
And thus gender would be something like personality. She ought to have noted
that no one really thinks that there are billions of different personalities or
that you can make up any personality you wish.

RRC summarizes the gender fluidity argument:

Once we
assert that the problem with gender is that we currently recognise only two of
them, the obvious question to ask is: how many genders would we have to
recognise in order not to be oppressive? Just how many possible gender identities
are there?

The
only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take. There are as many
possible gender identities as there are humans on the planet. According to
Nonbinary.org, one of the main internet reference sites for information about
non-binary genders, your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or
Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.

But if
this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense or adds anything to our
understanding to call any of this stuff ‘gender’, as opposed to just ‘human
personality’ or ‘stuff I like’. The word gender is not just a fancy word for
your personality or your tastes or preferences. It is not just a label to adopt
so that you now have a unique way to describe just how large and multitudinous
and interesting you are. Gender is the value system that ties desirable (and
sometimes undesirable?) behaviours and characteristics to reproductive
function. Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from
reproductive function – which we should – and once we’ve rejected the idea that
there are just two types of personality and that one is superior to the other –
which we should – what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff
‘gender’? What meaning does the word ‘gender’ have here, that the word
‘personality’ cannot capture?

RRC offers some good points, but she goes off the rails when
she embraces the feminist view that we should decouple gender identity from
reproductive function. Thus, she falls into the paranoid thinking, the kind
that has bedeviled feminism from its onset. In it, gender roles were imposed on
women by a vast patriarchal conspiracy.

Nevertheless she describes it well:

On this
view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers
to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable
behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.

The problem lies with the word “arbitrary.” If feminists believes
that gender roles are assigned arbitrarily they must also believe, as RRC does,
that these roles have nothing to do with anatomy, with reproduction, with
biology or with reality.

If gender identities define men as being stronger than
women, this is an arbitrary imposition. If you believe that you will believe
anything.

Feminism needs this hypothesis because it sees social
organization based on different gender roles as a massive right wing conspiracy to
oppress women, to force them to have and to raise children, thus to deprive
them of the full self-actualization they would achieve if they were captains of
industry or tech oligarchs. Thus, thetranshistorical universal conspiracy has defined the female role as maternal, inner directed, weak,
subordinate, passive, submissive, oppressed… what have you.

Oft times you get the impression that many of these women do
not like being women. They have no conception of how women exercise power in
relationships and in the world and have come to believe that the male way is
the only way.

Anyway RRC explains:

Not
only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but
they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two
positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity
above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two
reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external
genitals that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into
one of two classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are
convex, the inferior one if their genitals are concave.

From
birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that
moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and
nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and
aggressive. This value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating
individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’.
Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and
oppressive about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and
female people alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for
the radical feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting
people into pink and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’
personalities and preferences without the coercive influence of this
socially-enacted value system.

As I said, RRC simply goes off the rails. She ends up in a
ditch where there is no gender, where biology does not matter, where facts don't matter, and where we will
conclude that all of the social institutions that human beings have ever
constructed were designed to suppress women. Thinking such
thoughts must constitute a mania.

RRC concludes:

The way
to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not
a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is
not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then
build our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed
all the way through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes,
occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity
over femininity.

And also:

The
solution is not to reify gender by insisting on ever more gender categories
that define the complexity of human personality in rigid and essentialist ways.
The solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would
be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to
naturalise and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people,
and constrains the development of individuals of both sexes.

Behold the moral blindness and ignorance. You would think
that procreation is incidental to human life, that anyone can decide to mother
or to father a child, that there are no maternal instincts and that human
beings and their societies have no interest in being perpetuated. Without
procreation there is no future, of our communities or of our genes. Without
providing the best upbringing for children, the community will degenerate and
ultimately disintegrate.

We might ignore the Bible and other religious texts.
Have these people ever read Darwin? Do they understand nothing of evolution? Don't they see that you cannot base a human community on individual fantasies and delusions.

If you do not like women and want to caricature them as weak
and submissive and ineffective that is your constitutional right. But, be aware
of the fact that you, by your storytelling are diminishing and demeaning all
women who have considered it a valuable human enterprise to bring children into
the world and to provide them with the best upbringing. Today’s women have far
more opportunities than did women in the past, but they ought not to hold foremothers in contempt for not having said opportunities. The feminist attitude is grossly insulting,
to mothers, to grandmothers and to all of the women who preceded them.

Today, it reports on research from Tufts University, certainly
a reputable institution, that demonstrates, after years of anti-cholesterol
hysteria, that butter is not going to make you sick.

The story speaks for itself:

Butter
is not bad for us and does not raise the risk of heart disease, a major study
has found.

Scientists
discovered eating one tablespoon of butter a day had little impact on overall
mortality, no significant link with cardiovascular disease and strokes – and
could even have a small effect in reducing the risk of diabetes.

The
robust research - one of the largest meta-studies to be carried out on the
health effects of butter - adds weight to growing calls for the end of the
'demonising' of the dairy product and other saturated fats.

It
follows reports earlier this month that the Government is reconsidering its
advice to restrict saturated fat intake to limit the risk of heart disease,
after two recent studies found no link.

In the latest research, scientists from Tufts University in Boston analysed the
results of nine studies published since 2005 from 15 countries, including the
US, UK and Europe.

Results
were based on nearly 640,000 adults with an average age of between 44 and 71
years old, tracked over a combined total of 6.5 million years.

In
total, they studies included more than 28,000 deaths, nearly 10,000 cases of
cardiovascular diseases and nearly 24,000 cases of diabetes.

By combining and standardising the results, researchers found a daily serving
of butter – 14g or roughly one tablespoon – was associated with a 1 per cent
higher risk of death.

Butter
consumption had 'no significant association' with any type of cardiovascular
disease, including coronary heart disease and stroke.

A
smaller sample of results indicated a daily serving of butter was associated
with a 4 per cent lower risk of type 2 diabetes - although researchers said
this needed further investigation.

The paper
said: 'Together, these findings suggest relatively small or neutral
associations of butter consumption with long-term health… A major focus on
eating more or less butter, by itself, may not be linked to large differences
in mortality, cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

'In
sum, our findings do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary
guidelines on butter consumption, in comparison to other better established
dietary priorities.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Feminists are angry. Today’s feminists are just as angry as
their feminist foremothers. At the least provocation they will pop off. When
they do, you had best run for cover. If you are a man, that is. Because if you
strike back the furies will descend upon you. If you retaliate it will all be
your fault.

In many ways women have never had it so good. Yet, in some
ways, in some cases, today’s liberated women are more miserable than their
ancestors. And they let you know it. They never let you forget it.

They scream and yell. They throw things. They are protected
from blowback by a band of matriarchs who will string you up by your whatevers
if you dare say that they are behaving inappropriately or boorishly. If you
think that the Donald is boorish, you should read about young feminist Casey
Wilson. And you should also read about her mother Kathy Wilson.

Casey Wilson is an actress. She has often demonstrated appallingly
bad manners. Apparently, she had been taught that it is better to act like a
harridan than for anyone to think that you are feminine. She was raised by a
Republican father and a Democratic mother. Her mother was not just a Democrat;
she was a feminist activist. Kathy Wilson headed the National Women’s Political
Caucus. Amazingly, Wilson grew up in a household where people delighted in being ill mannered. It was inevitable that she become an actress.

If you were curious to know why Casey Wilson and so many
other young feminists are angry, we can read all about it. Wilson has written
an article about her appallingly bad behavior for Lenny, a magazine that is
being edited by one Lena Dunham. Yes, by that Lena Dunham. Happily, for those of us
who wish her well, Wilson has shown how she has gotten herself out of the cycle
of anger that her mother bequeathed her.

The first thing she tells us is that women’s anger is a
cultural appropriation. By the lights of feminists, men are angry. Ergo, if
women want to be more like men, they must be angry too. It will, presumably,
grow some hair on their chests.

How angry was Casey Wilson? Glad you asked. She regales us
with stories of her bad behavior:

When I
was a waitress and a man tipped me in pennies, I addressed the entire
restaurant and pointed at his wife and announced: "I just had to spend an
hour, but I'm so sorry you have to spend a lifetime with him."

I
tripped my college roommate after I overheard her say she didn't think I was
"fun."

At
sixteen, when my parents told me I couldn't go out, I pulled two heavy brass
sconces out of the wall by hanging from them, leaving only dangling wires in my
wake.

I have
seriously contemplated driving my car through my home for "effect."

And yet
I seem so mild mannered and sweet on the surface. But just underneath, I'm
seething.

Charming, don’t you think? One is surprised to hear that
Wilson has any friends at all.

Where did Wilson learn all of her bad habits? Surely, she
did not learn it from people like me who inveigh all the time against saying
out loud whatever is passing through your mind. Wilson was a living, breathing
example of someone who is living by the mantra that you should never repress
your emotions.

You guessed it: she learned it all from Mom and Dad. Surely,
the two had suffered from far too much therapy. Theirs is an example of what
therapy has wrought:

My
parents were highly successful, funny, passionate people who taught me life
should be lived out loud and all big feelings felt. My mom once tried to throw
a dining-room chair at my dad's head, and I barely looked up from Mr. Popper's Penguins. My dad
was arrested for screaming at a maître d' because they wouldn't seat an elderly
woman. Later, she told my dad that while she was grateful he had stuck up for a
stranger, they hadn't seated her because she was waiting for someone. (Oops.)

Of course, the world is not quite as tolerant toward these
outbursts, whether by parents or by daughter. Wilson is angry about that too:

I've
realized that anger doesn't seem to be as palatable on a woman as it is on a
man. And I'm angry about that. I'm angry at women who can't access their anger,
or who cover it by masquerading as little sweeties, or those who display it and
are off-putting. Which are all versions of myself I have spent my life trying
to wrangle and negotiate.

Since this is just therapy writ large, Wilson does not find
much help in therapy. In the bad old days, therapists were down with angry
outbursts. They called them authentic and encouraged them. At some point they
came to their senses and noticed that while anger felt momentarily cathartic, as
soon as an angry young woman looked back at what she had been doing she was
seized with anguish for having made herself look like a blithering fool. It isn’t
that easy to turn off your moral sense.

Wilson writes:

In the
moment, these eruptions felt fantastic. Nay, important. But afterward, I started feeling
disproportionately upset about my behavior, and it then became about the
emotional hangover the anger wrought. Where was this all coming from? I got
into therapy with the hopes of figuring it out. It's too boring to blame
everything on our moms, but I wonder if, maybe, the conservative wave of the
early '80s is something I can blame?

Wouldn’t you know it? She was taught to shift the blame.
After all, what good is the conservative movement or the Tea Party or the NRA
if you cannot pin all your failures on them?

It’s a thought. But, refreshingly Wilson has another
thought. She seems to understand that her feminist mother stoked her anger by
raising her according to an ideology:

My mom
was the president of the National Women's Political Caucus (an organization
devoted to getting women elected) for the first several years of my life. I
wonder if growing up with a mother who was so angry at the state of things she
wore a pro-choice sticker while eight months pregnant with me played a role.
She raised me to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. Which was
liberating and wonderful. But perhaps this combination had me feeling a little too free to be me. I had
become a subway ad: if I saw something, I said something. It wasn't a good
look, but no amount of therapy or meditation (my mantra made me EVEN. ANGRIER.)
or astrology retreats (I'm a Scorpio, doy) seemed to help with this particular
issue. I couldn't get a handle on it.

How does feminism stoke anger? It is easy to understand.
Feminism hands out advice. It tells women how to live their lives. It might
tell them to postpone marriage and family until they are in their mid-
thirties. It might tell them to do as they please, to hook up as much as they want,
to express their feelings openly, honestly and shamelessly.

But then, when they discover that they have waited too long
to have children or that last night’s hookup does not
respect them in the morning, feminists tell them that this is a sign of sexism,
misogyny, bigotry, hatred of women. When bad advice yields bad outcomes,
feminists exploit it to recruit people for the cause.

As it happens, Wilson’s story has a happy ending—but not in
the sense you are thinking—get your mind out of the gutter. She comes to her
senses. Or, should I say, her mother’s death causes her to reflect on what she
has been doing, to take a step back and to look at it from a more objective
distance. Strangely enough, and sadly enough, her mother’s death liberates her.

Examine her testimony:

Surprisingly,
the things that ended up helping me the most are arguably the things I have the
most reason to be angry about. I was not asked back to Saturday Night Live. My long-term
relationship ended poorly. My mom passed away. And yet when I received my
things in a brown box from SNL and
saw that bottles of alcohol had been thrown in with photos of my mom and
everything had exploded all over, I didn't feel angry. I felt sad. When the
former boyfriend declined my invitation to meet for coffee years later so I
could apologize, I just felt deep regret. And when the woman who did my mom's
makeup for her funeral came up to me in the receiving line and asked if she
could grab the number of the doctor who had done my mom's eye lift ... I
laughed. And gave it to her.

In the
realization that life is ever tenuous, I suddenly became less angry. I found
such joy in my work. I got married. I had a baby. Now, please note, I'm still
an angry bird, to be sure. But now I'm acutely aware that things and jobs and
people come ... and go. And I can't afford to destroy what and whom I have.

This tells us that the anger was an act, that it was put on,
that it was adopted in order to play a role in an ideologically-driven script. When
you come down to it, women are not angry and ought not to try to pretend to be
angry. And, dare we say, men are not, for the most part angry either. Or, at
least they would rather not be.

We applaud Wilson for having overcome her rage, or at least
for having learned to manage it. Because, the only thing that it as wrong as
being too angry is not being angry enough.

To follow up on yesterday’s post about feminism and biology,
here we have a transcript of a conversation between Camille Paglia (CP) and
Christina Hoff Sommers (CHS). The exchange took place recently at the American
Enterprise Institute. It comes to us from the Heat Street blog. Preceding it
were two other posts, here and here.

Both Paglia and Sommers bemoan the fact that women’s studies
have consistently ignored biological realities. For feminists gender is a
social construct … end of story. If you don’t accept it, shut up.

So, forewarned is forearmed. Consider your as having
received a trigger warning.

The transcript:

CP: The biggest gap in women’s studies is
the failure to have a requirement about biology. There’s no reference to
biology. You’ve now had 40 years of women’s studies where there is the social
constructionist view of gender — without the slightest reference to hormones or
endocrinology.

CHS: Forty years of women’s studies and I
think we know less about gender than we did when they started, for this very
reason. This dogma that men and women are the same; that we’re cognitively
interchangeable…

CHS: One feminist philosopher said many
years ago — we’re all born bisexual, and then through socialization we are
transformed into gendered human beings — one destined to command and the other
one to obey. I went throughout that with my husband too and he said: ”
Which one obeys and which one commends?”

CP: There you go. For heavens sake, I’m
someone who was writing a dissertation on androgyny and I never for one moment
in my entire life doubted that sexes are actually different. There are some
very powerful hormonal compulsion that drives the sexes together for
procreation, hello!

And, also:

CP: Men have on average 8 to 10 times the
amount of testosterone circulating in their body than women do. There are
consequences from that. But of course this subject is entirely untouched in
gender studies. You can graduate from with a degree in women studies and know
nothing about it.

CHS: Nothing! And anytime they find
statistical disparity between men and women. Any field — if there are more
male, particularly in engineering — it has to be discrimination.

CP: It can’t be women’s free choice for
any reason. On average, women are interested in other things.

CP: Also women want more flexibility in
life to allow for children. But that’s also not part of the feminist picture.

CHS: As if we don’t have a special bond
with children. The denial of nature, of femininity and masculinity — which for
most people is a source of enjoyment.

If you
are conventionally feminine, you enjoy that typically. Same with men — you
enjoy a masculine men. And all of that is now either denied, or there’s this
aura of disapproval around conventional sexuality.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Women’s reproductive health, as it is gingerly called, has
now been reduced to the right to an abortion. Supporters of Planned Parenthood
insist that they want women to be able to choose when they are going to get
pregnant, but sex education in schools today centers primarily on how not to
get pregnant, how not to stay pregnant, how not to contract an STD and how to
gain the most sexual pleasure.

What is missing from this picture? Procreation. Whatever
they are peddling over at Planned Parenthood, children in American schools
today are taught very little about procreation. One understands the rationale:
procreation is what the dimwits are now calling heteronormativity. Thus, we are
not allowed to connect sex with reproduction, because we do not want gays and
the transgendered feel that their sexuality is somehow different.

For all the talk about reproductive choice, the only choice
that contemporary culture warriors respect is the choice not to have a child.
Unless, of course, the woman is in her late forties and magically conceives—with
significant help from reproductive endocrinologists.

Freezing eggs is fine and good. Hormone treatments are
great. Egg donors are wonderful. What is not wonderful is a young woman having
a child the old-fashioned way.

Women have been hearing about the biological clock for
decades now, but somehow the message has not gotten through. Thus, it comes as
something of a surprise when actress Katherine Heigl gets pregnant for the
first time at 37 and announces to the world that she and her husband were
surprised that she still could. Apparently, her conscientious ob-gyn gave her
information that many American women have been at pains to repress: namely that
after age 35 female fertility declines precipitously.

Since male fertility does not obey the same timeline,
culture warriors have worked hard to ignore the fact, lest anyone imagine that
men and women are somehow biologically different.

As Bethany Mandel points out in an article about female fertility,
sex education in American schools has systematically repressed the connection
between sex and reproduction. It has emphasized: enjoying sex, not contracting
an STD and avoiding pregnancy.

Mandel explains:

… what
has been missing from health education in most schools for decades isn’t how to
avoid becoming pregnant, but how to get pregnant,
when the time is right. Instruction on birth control methods and the horrors of
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) form the entire curriculum, but few women
are taught the mechanics of their own fertility cycles, or anything about the
realities of their biological clocks.

Young women know all about the shades of grey. Many of them
have learned about sex education from watching porn or even from starring in
their own porn movies. They know everything there is to know about pleasuring themselves.
Yet, they know very little about their own fertility and do not much care to
know.

This should not come as a surprise. Women today are brought
up to put career ahead of family. They are taught that they must not get
married young and must not have children young. Thus the norm for marriage and
childbearing has extended into a woman’s thirties. From a feminist perspective,
this is the only acceptable choice.

Of course, a woman who has a free and open sex life in her
twenties is more likely to contract an STD. Some of the STDs compromise
fertility. Yes, condoms help, but condoms are not foolproof and many young
hookup artists are frankly behaving like fools. Telling women that using a
condom will protect them against all STDs is a lie… and a lie that might
cost them their fertility.

Mandel points out that thirtysomething women first start
becoming fully conscious of fertility when they hear about failed pregnancies.

She explains:

With
friends getting hitched and gestating left and right, women start hearing
things we were never taught about school: most notably, that sometimes, for
some women, getting pregnant isn’t so easy after all. We hear from married
friends facing difficulties starting families, and we hear about infertility
and miscarriage, which are more common than most millennials imagine. One in
ten couples will face infertility, and as many as one in three pregnancies will
end in miscarriage.

It’s not just about age. When women have careers that demand
long hours and extensive travel, procreation becomes far more difficult. A
stressed-out female body will have more difficulty conceiving or carrying to
term.

Of course, no one discusses the point. Men do not have the
same problem and we do not want anyone thinking that men and women are
different. Besides, women must work as
hard as men do, and therefore asking a woman to slow down in order to
facilitate fertility must be considered sexist.

As for the biological clock, Mandel describes its reality:

Fertility,
the ability to get pregnant, goes into a steep decline around age thirty-five,
and the risks of pregnancy increase beginning at the same age. At thirty-five,
it becomes harder to become pregnant, harder to stay pregnant (miscarriage risk
increases), and harder to have a healthy baby (birth defect rates also increase
with maternal and paternal age). The number of eggs (women are born with a
finite number) depletes, and the quality of the ones that remain decreases over
time.

Of course, it is not just what is taught in the schools.
Celebrity culture, Mandel notes, has been regaling us with stories of women in
their late 40s or later who have gotten pregnant:

Celebrity
culture offers us a seemingly endless number of stars who are apparently
untouched by age-related fertility problems. This Mother’s Day, for example,
Janet Jackson had extra reason to celebrate. At fifty years old, she was
pregnant with her first child. Celebrity-watchers have been transfixed for
years by the potential pregnancy of former Friends star Jennifer Aniston, now
forty-seven. Just this week, yet another tabloid claimed the star was expecting a child with husband Justin
Theroux. These examples are extreme, because the women in question are much
older than the average American mother. But mothers in their late thirties or
early forties, such as Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, and
Julia Roberts, are very much the norm in Hollywood.

And yet, Mandel continues, these stories never tell us the
cost in terms of fertility treatments. They do not tell us whether these women
are having babies using their own eggs. They do not tell us the failure rates
of women using frozen eggs:

Just as
Botox erases the signs of aging on the faces of celebrities, so too the
celebrity pregnancy trackers ignore the fact that many of these women most
likely had to avail themselves of expensive and painful fertility treatments to
become mothers. And those celebrities rarely discuss those treatments,
preferring instead to portray their pregnancies as happenstance (an exception:
Sarah Jessica Parker, then in her forties, who talked openly about her use of a surrogate to carry her twin daughters).

And, of course, no one knows very much about the long term
effect of fertility treatments, on a woman’s health and on her marriage.
Strangely enough, our national conversation about abortion suggests that pregnancy
is somehow or other unhealthy, while it says nothing about the potential health
risks associated with radical hormone treatments.

Monday, June 27, 2016

You might think that the biggest sore losers are the
intellectuals who are bitterly clinging to their failed religion-- Communism. Not
to be outdone, the British Remainders, those who lost the referendum on
remaining within the warm comforting motherly arms of the European Union, are wailing
uncontrollably about the stupidity of those who did not vote as they wished
them to vote, who did not do as they were told.

Now that the British public has chosen to Leave the EU, because
they refuse to allow their politics and policy be dictated by a bunch of
unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, British elites have risen up as one and, in
a great cry of anguish, denounced Leave voters as idiots and fools, people who
should probably never have been allowed to vote in the first place.

It’s sore loser Heaven with the losers in the Remainder camp
calling for a do-over, another vote. Because democratic elections are fine as
long as the intellectually inferior masses vote the way the philosopher-kings
want them to vote.

People voted for Brexit because the ruling classes had been
ignoring them. Now, in a grand psychological reprisal the elites are striking
out in fury against the ignorant masses. As Brendan O’Neill explains it in The
Spectator, the losers are howling against democracy.

O’Neill describes the scene in Great Britain:

There’s
a delicious irony to Remainers’ branding of Leave voters as confused
individuals who have simply made a desperate howling noise, whose anti-EU vote
was a ‘howl of anger’ (Tim Farron) or a ‘howl of frustration’ (JK Rowling). Which is that if
anyone’s been howling in recent days, it’s them, the top dogs of the Remain
campaign. They are howling against the demos; raging against the people; fuming
about a system that allows even that portly bloke at the end of your street who
never darkened the door of a university to have a say on important political
matters. That system we call democracy.

All things considered, the intelligentsia has come up with a
series of cogent explanations for why people ignored their best advice. To the great minds of Britain, those who voted to Leave the
EU were misinformed idiots, victims of a confidence trick, abused by a motley
band of demagogues, led by their emotions, not their reason.

O’Neill explains:

No
sooner had an awe-inspiring 17.5m people rebelled against the advice of
virtually every wing of the establishment and said screw-you to the EU than
politicos were calling into question the legitimacy of their democratic cry.
Apparently the people were ill-informed, manipulated, in thrall to populist
demagoguery, and the thing they want, this unravelling of the EU, is simply too
mad and disruptive a course of action to contemplate. So let’s overturn the
wishes of this dumb demos.

All of which dramatizes the reasoning of the proles who
voted against the best interest of the toffs.

So, certain members of the political class, joined by
certain members of the media and the intellectual classes are trying to see how
they can overturn the vote. If that is not possible, they want the government
to ignore it altogether.

O’Neill continues:

So it
is that David Lammy has howled against the ‘madness’ of the
vote. We can ‘bring this nightmare to an end through a vote in Parliament’, he
said. That nightmare he’s talking about is the people having their say, the
throng making a choice. The UN Special Representative for International
Migration, Peter Sutherland, has also openly called for the crushing
of the people’s will. British voters were hoodwinked by a ‘distortion of
facts’, he says — because we’re that stupid — and ‘somehow this result must be
overturned’. UN officials condemn African or Asian dictators who ride roughshod
over the will of their peoples, yet seek to foment the same in Britain.

Of course, the media has been piling on. As has the
professoriat, in the person of a distinguished Harvard professor named Kenneth Rogoff:

Media
commentary has dripped with contempt for the moronic people. ‘Some of the
oldest and whitest people on the planet leapt at a chance to vote against the
monsters in their heads’, howled a writer for Esquire. There’s much talk about the
people being ‘manipulated’ by lies and misinformation, as if they’re lifeless
putty in the hands of the likes of Farage. Some have gone so far as to twist
the definition of democracy in an attempt to rubbish the people’s will. ‘The
idea that somehow any decision reached anytime by majority rule is necessarily
“democratic” is a perversion of the term’, says Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff. Sometimes, democracy
means making sure the people ‘avoid making uninformed decisions with
catastrophic consequences’, he says. So it can be democratic to thwart the
majority’s wishes if we think they’re stupid. And they have the gall to talk
about manipulation.

Enough with democracy. Enough with listening to the voice of
the people. At the least we are seeing in action the totalitarian yearnings of
the ruling elites in England. It resembles the attitude of American intellectuals.

In passing, one is constrained to point out that, in
America, those who are less intelligent and less educated vote Democratic all
the time. Apparently, voting for Democrats allows you to think that you are of
one mind with the smart people.

As for the overeducated youth of Britain, they are not occupying the City,
the center of British banking, but are demonstrating and remonstrating against
the ignorant masses who voted for Brexit.

O’Neill describes the scene:

Youthful
activists are adding a thin veneer of radicalism to this howl against democracy
by taking to the streets to call on MPs to refuse to make Brexit a reality. A ragtag bunch of pro-EU youths shouted outside
parliament yesterday. More marches are planned. Let’s be honest about what
these are: marches against the people; streams of largely middle-class
activists demanding that the will of the ordinary be kept in check. No number
of colourful placards or PC-sounding platitudes can disguise the nasty,
reactionary nature of such gatherings.

Sad to say it but the sore-loser leftists have no real use
for democracy. They will tolerate it if they get their way. Otherwise they will
lash out in irrational fury against those who would dare defy their will.

They respect the will of the people if the will of the
people echoes their views. Just as American universities have been shutting
down free and open debate, the better to become indoctrination mills, the
British intelligentsia has been doing the same.

Last Thursday’s vote has shown that their efforts have not
been quite as effective as they think and that they have lost the confidence of
the people. The British public has voted no confidence in them and they are
incensed to feel unappreciated. How dare these people—many of whom are loyal
Labour voters-- say that they have not been doing a good job.

For the icing on the cake, take the example of a British
media intellectual named Philippe Legrain. Writing in the New York Times
Legrain has taxed Leave voters with economic ignorance. He tells them, in the
same threatening tone that Remainders have been using, that they will
soon pay the price of their ignorance.

As it happens, Legrain himself, in his wisdom, has been a
great proponent of unlimited immigration from North Africa and the Middle East.
He is like Angela Merkel in a suit and tie. How stupid do you have to be to think that
that is a good idea?

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Apparently, Christopher Hitchens was wrong. Religion does
not poison everything. The jury has still not decided whether atheism poisons
everything, but while we are awaiting the verdict we note with J.D. Vance that
religion plays a beneficial role in many peoples' lives.

This, from today's New York Times, of all places. Note that
Vance quotes research conducted by one Jonathan Gruber. You recall that Gruber
was the architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare.

Vance writes:

Research
suggests that children who attend church perform better in school, divorce less
as adults and commit fewer crimes. Regular church attendees even exhibit less
racial prejudice than their nonreligious peers. The M.I.T. economist Jonathan
Gruber found that for many of these traits, this relationship is causal: It’s
not just that privileged kids who attend church skew the data, but that
attending services produces good character.

These
benefits apply broadly, across a range of faiths, so the phenomenon appears
unrelated to doctrine or place. Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help
build social cohesion. It was at my dad’s medium-size evangelical church — my
first real exposure to a sustained religious community — that I first saw
people of different races and classes worshiping together. The church even
collected money to help families in need and established a small school and
home for single expectant mothers.

As the Obama administration declares war on American gun
owners, it prefers not to interfere in the daily lives of the people who live
in the ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria.

One might expect the administration to face down the terrorists
where they live, to make their lives into living hell, even to do as Peter
Quinn suggested, turning Raqqa into a parking lot. Instead, it is offering up
large dollops of empathy.

Debra Heine has the story on Pajamas Media. No one else seems to have noticed. If they noticed, no one seems
to care. It comes from testimony offered by an assistant secretary of defense
to the House Armed Services Committee.

The question was simple: if we know that ISIS uses the
internet to recruit jihadis and to set up operations, why have we not shut it down
in Raqqa. Whatever happened to making war against their command and control centers?

Heine reports:

Rep. Martha
McSally, a retired fighter pilot, posed the question to the assistant secretary
of defense for homeland defense and global security, Thomas
Atkin: “We have known cells in Raqqa that are directing training, that are
directing operations very specifically targeting against Americans,” McSally
said. “Why is the Internet not shut down in Raqqa?”

Atkin
noted that he would give a more detailed answer during the closed-door hearing
in the afternoon, but answered in general terms. “Certainly going after specific
nodes to hamper and stop the use of the Internet by ISIS is important, but we
also have to respect the rights of citizens to have access to the Internet,” he
said. “So it’s a careful balance, even in Raqqa.”

What is this business about “rights of citizens?” People who
live under the caliphate are not citizens. They are being enslaved. Unless they
are the ones doing the enslaving. Why are we showing a special level of respect
to the people of Raqqa, at the expense of American lives?

And where does it say that everyone everywhere has a
God-given right to the internet?

Chairman Mac Thornberry called out Atkins on his absurd
response:

Later
on in the hearing, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry
expressed his concern regarding Atkin's answer about protecting the rights of
citizens in Raqqa. “I understand the concept of proportionality,” he said,
“but are you arguing that the citizens of Raqqa have some sort of inherent
right to access the Internet that you all have to try to weigh?”

“Taking
out the Internet” isn’t a straightforward operation, Atkin replied. The Islamic
State and other guerrilla/terrorist forces often rely on civilian
infrastructure, so shutting down their Internet service provider also cuts off
legitimate civilian users in a wide area. “How that effect occurs has greater
impact than just against the adversary and we have to weigh that into all our
operations,” he said, “whether that’s a kinetic or a cyber operation.”

After
some additional back and forth — ending with an awkward silence from the
administration witnesses — Thornberry reserved further questions for the
classified hearing. “Okay, well, we’ll talk more about it,” he said, “but,
again, I am not yet reassured.”

The
administration’s position is that cyber operations must follow the same laws of
war as physical combat, and that cyber attacks require the same kind of review
as kinetic strikes. That includes such considerations as collateral damage —
e.g. in shutting down the terrorists’ Internet access, do you take it out for
innocent civilians as well? — and proportionality — is the damage to civilians
excessive for the military gain?

“Our
operations in cyberspace are subject to the same rules as every operation, so
we’re constrained by the laws of armed conflict and other limitations,” said
Lt. Gen. Kevin McLaughlin, deputy commander of CYBERCOM. “We feel like we have
the authorities and flexibility we need.”

Here again is a lesson in how not to fight a war. If you
want to know why ISIS has been allowed to metastasize under the Obama
administration, look at our rules of engagement. If we are that solicitous toward
our enemies, that empathetic toward their concerns, we are showing them that
they are strong and we are weak. Victory in war does not go to the squeamish.

The article is slightly dated. Camille Paglia gave the interview in
October, 2015. CNS News (a conservative network) reported it in November, 2015.

And yet, Paglia’s thoughts, if anything, are even more
incisive now than they were then. Since they echo similar thoughts that I have
offered on this blog, I find them especially relevant.

Paglia looks at America’s openness about transgenderism, in
particular, and sees it as a sign of cultural collapse. A culture that enters a
decadent phase is on the way to oblivion.

CNS offers a transcript of her words:

... Camille
Paglia said in an interview last month that the rise of transgenderism
in the West is a symptom of decadence and cultural collapse.

Most importantly, she recommends that while we are
regaling ourselves with the thought of mandating transgender restrooms and while we have become especially tolerant of open expressions of homosexuality, we ought to
ask ourselves how this all looks to the outside world, especially to the
jihadis.

CNS continues:

“Nothing... better
defines the decadence of the West to the jihadists than our toleration of open
homosexuality and this transgender mania now,” Paglia said during an October 22interview on the Brazilian
television program Roda Viva.

And also:

"So
rather than people singing the praises of humanitarian liberalism that allows
all of these transgender possibilities to appear and to be encouraged, I would
be concerned about how Western culture is defining itself to the world.

"Because
in fact these phenomena are inflaming the irrational, indeed borderline
psychotic opponents of Western culture in the form of ISIS and other jihadists,
etcetera," Paglia said.

"Nothing...
better defines the deadence of the West to the jihadists than our
toleration of open homosexuality and this transgender mania now."

As for propagandists (like Judith Butler) who are militating
for such decadence by promoting the notion of gender multiplicity and who believe that we can all decide which gender we are,
Paglia offers up some cogent criticism, including the obvious fact that
allowing hormone treatment to children, to say nothing of allowing surgery to teenagers is child abuse:

Paglia
also said during the interview that “transgender propagandists” are
overstating their case.

“I
think that the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the
multiplicity of gender,” she said.

“Sex
reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact
change anyone’s sex, okay. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a
trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But
ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains
coded for your biological birth.

“So
there are a lot of lies being propagated at the present moment, which I think
is not in anyone’s best interest.

"Now
what I’m concerned about is the popularity and the availability of sex
reassignment surgery, so that someone who doesn’t feel that he or she belongs
to the biological birth, gender. People are being encouraged to intervene
in the process.

"Parents
are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form
of child abuse. The hormones to slow puberty, actual surgical
manipulations, etcetera. I think that this is wrong, that people should wait
until they are of an informed age of consent.

“Parents
should not be doing this to their children and I think that even in the teenage
years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and
people adapt."

Note well: every single cell is coded for biological gender.
Few people have had the nerve to stand up against the transgender
propagandists. Hats off again to Paglia for telling it like it is and for
speaking truth to power.

The New York Times has dedicated eight pages to Brexit
coverage. The story is of historical significance and deserves that much space. Credit to the New York Times.

For my part, I have collected some salient and incisive
commentaries from various places. I present them as a service, the better to provide useful
information.

We begin with the question
of who is responsible. Writing in Slate Reihan Salam names the primary culprit:
Tony Blair. It tells us why Blair was so crestfallen at the results of the
referendum.

The former Labor Party prime minister began the process by
opening Britain to more immigration. He was a great purveyor of a cosmopolitan
worldview that has now been repudiated… often by Labour voters.

Salam wrote:

One
gets the sense Blair understands, on a gut level, that Britain’s rejection of
the EU is a rejection of his worldview….

As
prime minister during the 1990s, he often made the case for deeper European
integration. More broadly, Blair proved himself to be among the most
emphatically cosmopolitan world leaders in recent history.

For the past twenty years Britain has been living under the
Blair government’s policy:

Since
1997, when the Labour Party, under his leadership, swept into office in a
landslide, British society has been transformed by a wave of immigration
unprecedented in its history. Over the following years, roughly twice as many immigrants arrived in the
United Kingdom as had arrived in the previous half-century. Many who arrived
during that earlier era hailed from the Caribbean and South Asia, and by the
early 1990s, 7 percent of England and Wales’ population belonged to ethnic
minorities. By now, that share has grown to over 14 percent.

The EU compounded the problem by opening its doors to
relatively impoverished Eastern and central European states.

Salam explains:

When a
number of countries in Eastern and central Europe joined the EU, most existing
member states put temporary limits in place on the freedom of movement to
ensure they wouldn’t experience a large and potentially disruptive influx of
new arrivals. Blair’s government decided not to do so on the assumption that immigration from the
new member states would be relatively modest. In fact, immigration from the new
member states far surpassed the government’s projections.

It was not just the immigrants. To be more welcoming the Blair government’s decision offered many of
the benefits of citizenship, especially welfare payments, to people who had
just arrived:

Under
Tony Blair, Britain greatly expanded the use of refundable tax credits as a
tool for poverty reduction, and this strategy has been wildly successful. But
under EU rules, Hungarian newcomers are just as entitled to these benefits as,
say, a poor Welshman. Regardless of whether this is a good idea, it is easy to
see why some Britons find it frustrating. The only way Britain can make itself
less attractive to less-skilled European immigrants is by imposing labor market
regulations and welfare reforms that would apply to everyone, including
less-skilled British workers. If
we’re going to curb welfare spending, some British voters are asking, why not start with European immigrants
who’ve just showed up on our doorstep? If the European Union requires
Britons and other EU citizens be treated the same, why not leave the EU and be
done with it?

In The Atlantic David Frum offers more details about the
immigration problem, with a special nod to Angela Merkel:

The
force that turned Britain away from the European Union was the greatest mass
migration since perhaps the Anglo-Saxon invasion. 630,000 foreign nationals settled
in Britain in the single year 2015. Britain’s population has grown
from 57 million in 1990 to 65 million in 2015, despite a native birth rate
that’s now below
replacement. On Britain’s present course, the population would top 70
million within another decade, half of that growth
immigration-driven….

If any
one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela
Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open
Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African
migrants, with uncountable millions more to come. Merkel’s catastrophically
negative example is one that perhaps should be avoided by U.S. politicians who
seek to avert Trump-style populism in the United States. Instead, the
politician who most directly opposes Donald Trump—presumptive Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton—is doubling down on Merkelism.

A nice phrase that: Hillary Clinton is “doubling down on
Merkelism.”

For the economics of Brexit we turn to George Friedman—no relation
to Thomas. Formerly of Stratfor, George Friedman is one Friedman who is well worth
reading.

Even though all of the world’s great economists and bankers
backed Remain, Friedman points out that, for Great Britain, the EU was a mixed
economic blessing:

Supporters
of remaining in the EU made the case that there would be substantial economic
costs. Opponents of the EU noted the obvious, which is that the EU is a
dysfunctional economic entity that has been unable to address the economic
problems that have developed since 2008. It has not addressed the condition of
southern Europe, where unemployment has remained at more than 20 percent for
years, nor the high
unemployment in France. The profound difference between the lives of
southern Europeans, including the middle class, and Germans, who enjoy 4.2
percent unemployment, is profound. Europe as a whole has stagnated
economically.

Those who supported Remain—the Remainders—threated the
public with the dire consequences, beginning with the end of London’s central
role in the world banking system.

Friedman debunks the notion:

In the
end, the Europeans need the financial services London provides. They will not
lock it out. The European Union did not create the financial relationships that
exist. Britain’s financial role goes back almost two centuries. The EU is a
system that aligns with financial reality. It does not create it. The threat of
consequences was not persuasive.

And of course, there was a class angle. Everyone knows that voters
were repudiating the governing elites, the guardian class that had been ruling
Europe by bureaucratic diktat. The British people were voting these unelected
bureaucrats out of office:

The
degree to which this was a vote that was directed against the British elite is
vital to understand. Politicians, business leaders and intellectuals were all
seen as having lost their right to control the system. The elites had contempt
for their values – for their nationalism and their interests. This is not a new
phenomenon in Europe, but it is one that the EU had thought it had banished.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Fraser Nelson explains
the influence of the bureaucrats:

The
Brexit campaign started as a cry for liberty, perhaps articulated most clearly
by Michael Gove, the British justice secretary (and, on this issue, the
most prominent dissenter in Mr. Cameron’s cabinet). Mr. Gove offered practical
examples of the problems of EU membership. As a minister, he said, he deals
constantly with edicts and regulations framed at the European level—rules that
he doesn’t want and can’t change. These were rules that no one in Britain asked
for, rules promulgated by officials whose names Brits don’t know, people whom
they never elected and cannot remove from office. Yet they become the law of
the land. Much of what we think of as British democracy, Mr. Gove argued, is
now no such thing.

Others are bemoaning the vote because they say that it has
set off a grand financial crisis. David Goldman does the math and explains
that, even if Britain suffers, Italy is a far greater danger to the global
economy than a Great Britain that functioning outside of the EU.

Goldman writes:

This is
NOT a global financial crisis. The hissing sound you hear is the air leaving
various financial bubbles, but this is not 2008 all over again.

The
British corporate sector has a strong balance sheet. Among the companies in the
FTSE 100 equity index, net debt is only twice earnings before interest and
taxes, slightly more than the S&P 500. Italian companies by contrast have
net debt at nearly 8 times earnings before interest and taxes. The record fall
in the pound sterling brings its exchange rate against the Euro to precisely
where it was in 2014, before the pound rose against the European unit along
with the US dollar. It’s a long-need correction that will benefit the British
economy, which has suffered from an overvalued currency.

Financial
authorities around the world warned of dire consequences were Britain to leave
the Euro, but it’s hard to see what these might be. Britain’s auto industry is
mostly owned by German companies, who will not stop producing or buying cars
made in their British plants. The 2008 collapse had already cleaned most of the
fluff out of the City of London, which shed more than 130,000 jobs in the years
after the crisis. The global ambitions of European banks are long since gone
and it is unlikely that a great deal of financial business will leave the
already-shrunken City.

Britain
contributes half a percent of its GDP to the rest of Europe each year, mostly
to Eastern Europe; this drain on the British taxpayer will end. Most important,
the ambitions of the European Commission to install a supranational government
dictating fiscal and regulatory policy to its members have collapsed. Europe’s
ambitions to field a common foreign policy also are in ruins after today’s
vote.